March 19th, 2010.
Alex
Oracle BI EE not only helps you to visualize information using charts and graphs, but it also gives you the opportunity to add geographical dimension to your reports.
With today’s globalization of business, many organizations have their branch offices located in various countries or even across different continents. Viewing individual branches and their performance, presented on the geographical map, can give companies further insights into their business. Oracle provides a powerful engine that can analyze and display the data from your data warehouse on the map or even integrate it with Google maps.
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February 19th, 2010.
admin
One of the things OBIEE doesn’t have out of the box is a user comment option (although future versions may have integration with Oracle Webcenter, which provides social computing). So what are our options if we need to leave comments about specific reports/dashboards or give users the option to add documentation to the reports? One option is to embed Google wave in an OBI dashboard for feedback and wiki type documentation.
Google wave is a new kind of collaboration tool that combines elements of email, wiki and chat. Basically everything on a wave can be edited. A varying number of users can be part of the wave or it can be public like in the example below. A wave can be embedded on any Web page. An embedded wave can be edited either on the page itself or through Google wave accounts.
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February 1st, 2010.
Gianluca
One of the greatest advantages of buying an OBI Application – Project, Supply Chain or any other of the many Analytics flavours – is the set of predefined ETL mappings, sessions and workflows that come with it.
Although there is a good chance that the OLTP data source is highly customised, the online Oracle documentation is full of information that can make the ETL developer’s life easier. That said, there are some important ETL tasks whose logic isn’t very easy to find. They are like black boxes: you customise them a little bit – some fields behind the X_CUSTOM placeholder here, a small datatype change in the target table there – and they operate their magic.
So let’s reveal the truth behind the veil of a very important out of the box ETL logic in OBI Apps: the Slowly Changing Dimension management mappings.
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December 22nd, 2009.
Gianluca
In a not so remote past, one of the biggest frustrations for ETL designers was having to replicate a job many times in order to accommodate slight differences depending on the data source. Whether it’s a change in the source table definition or a different clause in the extract SQL, today’s ETL tools have embed capabilities that allow for the reuse of metadata objects to save time and improve maintainability of the workflows.
In this post, I will describe with simple examples how to best reuse ETL mappings in Informatica PowerCenter using the SQL override capability.
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December 15th, 2009.
admin
Sometimes we need to combine measures from two fact tables in the same report and apply a filter to one of them. If the filter is on a dimension shared by both fact tables; that’s great. However, if the dimension is only related to one of the facts, then we have a problem: Oracle BI would show null values for a measure that’s not related to the dimension.
Imagine that we have two fact tables: Revenue and Budget. Revenue is recorded for Product but also contains information about General Ledger (GL) Account. Budget is defined for Product but not for GL Account so there’s no relationship between them. Our business model is shown in the image below. Of course in a normal repository there would be more dimensions and facts but they have been left out to clarify the example.
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